Angry Bird and Dreamy Smurf Are Watching You

Did the spies at Britain’s General Communications Headquarters look into the past of Dreamy Smurf before naming one of their iPhone data-scooping tools after him? In “Dreamy’s Pen Pals,” a cartoon that first aired in October, 1985, Dreamy is himself the object of surveillance, as Brainy and Clumsy trace his mail. The G.C.H.Q.’s Dreamy, in contrast, can “stealthily activate a phone,” according to a new report in the Guardian. The agency also has what it calls Tracker Smurf, for collecting location data from an iPhone or Android (his cartoon counterpart collects truffles); Nosey Smurf, which turns on a smartphone’s microphone remotely; and Paranoid Smurf, which hides the other surveillance smurfs. The real Nosey, in the cartoons, actually resembles a hostile caricature of Edward Snowden, causing explosions by failing to heed admonitions about classified information; and there is no Paranoid Smurf—maybe that is just the name for the entire experience of spy agencies give you flashbacks to the aqua-saccharine cartoons of your childhood.

But screechy animations are not just material for code names. According to the Guardian,

The GCHQ documents set out examples of what information can be extracted from different ad platforms, using perhaps the most popular mobile phone game of all time, Angry Birds—which has reportedly been downloaded more than 1.7bn times—as a case study.

Angry Birds can apparently be used to determine location, as well as a raft of other personal information. (Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, told the Guardian that it didn’t “have any previous knowledge of this matter.”) The app collection appears to have been a joint project of G.C.H.Q. and the N.S.A. According to the Times, which, along with the Guardian and ProPublica, reported on the documents Monday (they came from Snowden), the agencies “traded recipes” that they used

for grabbing location and planning data when a target uses Google Maps, and for vacuuming up address books, buddy lists, phone logs and the geographic data embedded in photos when someone sends a post to the mobile versions of Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and other services.

Both the Times and the Guardian published an N.S.A. slide that referred to uploading a photo to a social-media site a “perfect scenario” for data collection. (Another way in, previously reported, is through S.M.S. alerts sent by apps.) Some of those apps can tell the N.S.A. where people had been or might be, based on the addresses they’d looked up; how old they are; income; ethnicity; and whom they might love. In that area, the Guardian said, “options included ‘single,’ ‘married,’ ‘divorced,’ ‘swinger’ and more.” (More? Imagining Swinger Smurf is really bad enough.) There were also categories for sexual orientation: straight, gay, bisexual, and not sure. According to the Times, “It is unclear whether the ‘not sure’ category exists because so many phone apps are used by children or because insufficient data may be available.”

The N.S.A., in its response, told the Times that it didn’t “profile everyday Americans,” and that, “because some data of U.S. persons may at times be incidentally collected in N.S.A.’s lawful foreign intelligence mission, privacy protections for U.S. persons exist across the entire process.” As with all of the N.S.A.’s responses to the Snowden revelations, one wonders, a little wearily, how much work the qualifiers “everyday” and “incidentally” are doing. (There was some progress on Monday toward figuring that out: the Justice Department announced that it would let tech companies tell their customers a little bit more about how common it is for the government to send them “national-security letters” demanding private data.)

Then there’s the word “phone.” The N.S.A. likes to complain that the critics don’t understand how much technology has changed, and yet it justifies things like metadata collection and phone records with a 1979 Supreme Court decision involving a phone that is about as similar to a modern iPhone as it is to a Telesmurf, with its melon-blossom receivers. According to the Times, “One secret report shows that just by updating Android software, a user sent more than 500 lines of data about the phone’s history and use onto the network.” We are allowed to have phones with games featuring demented birds without being spied on. And, when we’re spied on anyway, we’re allowed to be angry.

Illustration by Richard McGuire.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.